Linguists research Timucua, a language with no speakers

Two linguists at William and Mary, Jack Martin and Ann Reed, both
of whom are associate professors of English, are picking up the trail
of a language that has not been spoken for centuries. Various scholars
over the years have tried to tackle the case of Timucua, the lost
tongue once spoken by Native Americans throughout northern Florida that
survives only in a few Florida place names and in museums in the form
of old documents written by Spanish priests. The last native speakers
of Timucua vanished after being put on a boat to Cuba in 1732.

Linguists have a set of tools that can be used to fill in blank spots
in lost tongues by drawing on related languages, but those devices are
of little help to Reed and Martin, as there are no known languages
related to Timucua. Martin, an authority on Creek and the Muskogean
languages, noted that despite the proximity of the cultures, only a
couple of words—such as a word for the saw palmetto—are common to
Timucua and Creek.

What little is known about the lost language comes from documents
printed in the early 1600s by Franciscan missionaries who worked among
the Timucua. Most of these books were compiled by Father Francisco
Pareja.

“He wrote something called the Confessionario—questions
that the priests could ask penitents when they were coming to the
confessional. We have a wonderful copy available to us which has
Spanish and Timucua,” Reed said. “It’s a wonderful resource on the
language, but the language has proved very difficult to parse. We spent
more than a year on it. Many people going back through the 19th century
have spent decades on it, and we still don’t have a very good idea of
how the language works.”

In addition to the Confessionario, there are Pareja’s Timucua grammar, Arte,
and several catechisms. Together, these documents in Timucua and
Spanish make up a tantalizingly large body of clues for untangling the
mystery of the language.

“In terms of a gloss to the Spanish, Pareja is very good,” Reed said.
“He’ll give a word, then a gloss of the Spanish. He’ll give a short
sentence, and then put it in Spanish. Someone could spend three months
working on comparatives because he has a page of comparative sentences:
So-and-so is taller than so-and-so. So-and-so is a better warrior than
so-and-so. And, for a linguist, that’s wonderful material to have. It
amounts to some kind of organized data.”

The clues gleaned from the documents to date are quite basic. The
fundamental construction of Timucua is familiar, and Reed said it is
clear that verbs are put together with multiple suffixes and a few
prefixes.

“Structurally, it’s very much a native Southeastern language,” Martin
said. “So in all of the native languages of the Southeast, except the
Iroquoian and Algonquian languages, you have a certain word order. You
have subject, object, verb. You have demonstratives before the noun,
you have adjectives after the noun, possessives before the possessed
item. Right across the board, it is that way.”

One of the difficulties that remains is negotiating the prescriptive
Eurocentric approach to the native language taken by Father Pareja and
others as they tried to describe Timucua by using familiar terms,
structure and concepts from Latin and Greek.

“In the Arte,
in a very traditional and probably inappropriate way, Pareja went
through what he considered to be the basic parts of speech, but it was
all based on European languages,” Reed explained. “So he describes
Timucua nouns and the endings that they take—even sometimes when they
don’t take endings! Then he goes through the verbs and the other parts
of speech, some of which, again, don’t even match up with European
languages.”

The Arte was lost for a time, then
rediscovered and published in the 1890s by two Frenchmen who further
muddied the linguistic waters. “If these guys decided that a certain
combination of sounds was a prefix in Timucua, they felt quite free to
go through the document and change it, regularize it completely,” Reed
said.
It was this “regularized” 1890s edition of the Arte that Reed
and Martin had been using as a resource. The only known copy of
Pareja’s original 1614 document is in the New York Public Library. Reed
took digital photographs of the Arte in the library last summer. She and Martin are seeking permission to create a parallel version of the Arte.
“Our basic strategy for deciphering the language is to create a
parallel English translation and then to pull out every Timucua form
from that and put it in a concordance—a word index,” Martin said. “Then
we’ll be able to use that for other studies.”

Both Martin and Reed agree that their study of Timucua is likely to
take many years. Several undergraduates have already contributed to the
project; two are writing honors theses on Timucua and another is
transcribing the original Arte.
The process continues to yield many insights, both about the language
itself and about the history of the very early years of the European
presence in the New World.